Spectrum Production's 1,300-drone show lit up the sky over KVIFF

This year the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival skipped its traditional fireworks in favor of a technological spectacle: 1,300 drones lit up the sky over Sokolský Hill, with the entire armada controlled by just one pilot. Behind the show, a record for Czechia, is Spectrum Production CEO David Zaoralek.

The show, titled “Stars and Winners of Their Own Story,” was created with the support of the company Allwyn together with the Drone Show Europe brand — one of Europe's drone-show pioneers, which belongs to Spectrum Production itself. “At a film festival, everyone admires the stars on the screen. But with our show, we wanted to get across to everyone that you yourself are the main character of your own story,” Zaoralek explains the concept.

The ten-minute performance combined light formations, music and text against the backdrop of the night sky, which functioned as a giant screen — some formations spanned up to 220 meters wide, the length of two football pitches. The show was repeated on Tuesday as well, so that more spectators could see it.

For Zaoralek, the move into drones is a logical step for a company that started fifteen years ago with video mapping and multimedia projections, and later staged large-scale shows abroad as well as Slovakia's national exhibition at Expo in Dubai. Clients had long been asking to bring their shows straight into the sky, but older technologies — lasers and holograms — couldn't deliver the precision needed outdoors.

The turning point came around 2017–2018, when the first major drone shows began appearing around the world, including at the Winter Olympics in South Korea. “At that point we went around, I'd say, pretty much every company that was doing drone shows. There were maybe no more than ten of them in the whole world,” Zaoralek recalls. Spectrum Production itself only took up staging drone shows from 2020, once Europe got a unified legal framework from EASA permitting such events.

Since then, progress has moved fast: in 2023 the company held the European record with 500 drones, and just a year later the European record stood at three thousand units. The latest models can safely lift up to ten thousand drones at once, while the world record belongs to China's EHang — 22,580 drones over an area of more than 5×3 km in Hefei.

Despite the scale of the show, the team on site in Karlovy Vary was modest — 10 to 20 people: the lead pilot, a second pilot, observers and technicians, plus another 10–15 specialists, including the creative agency and the recording studio that put together the choreography itself. Spectrum Production's key competitive edge is its own in-house animation software for the shows, which lets it smoothly change the order of programmed formations mid-flight — something that remains an extremely difficult task for competitors.